Exploring the value of Shackleton’s name
Ireland’s Fine Arts, antiques and collectables column
‘AS A scientific leader give me Scott; for swift and efficient polar travel, Amundsen; but when things are hopeless and there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
That’s from Sir Raymond Priestley’s address to the British Association in 1956. All three were major figures in the history of Antarctic exploration: Scott was English and Amundsen was Norwegian, but Ernest Shackleton (18741922) hailed from Kilkea, Co Kildare.
On February 6, a sledge from the first expedition to the Antarctic led by Ernest Shackleton sold for £143,750 (€163,901) in the Travel and Exploration Sale at Bonhams in London. The estimate was £60,000 to £100,000 (€67,000 to €110,000). The sledge was used on the British Antarctic Nimrod Expedition (1907-9), which set out with the aim of reaching the South Pole. It didn’t, but made it further south than anyone had ever been before. The explorers returned at the point of starvation and received a hero’s welcome. “A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?” he said to his wife on his return. “Yes darling, as far as I am concerned,” Emily Shackleton replied. The exchange is recorded in Roland Huntford’s biography, Shackleton (1985).
Four people attempted the sledge march to the South Pole: Shackleton, Jameson Adams, Frank Wild and Eric Marshall, surgeon, cartographer and photographer. The sledge was owned by Marshall, who donated it to his old public school, Monkton Combe in Somerset. The sledge is about 11 foot and described in the catalogue: “ash on a hickory frame … reinforced with metal braces, leather straps and thick string ties.”
In 1907, prior to the Nimrod expedition, Shackleton travelled to Christiania (now Oslo) and commissioned 18 11-foot sledges “of the Nansen pattern”. Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram expedition of 1893-96 had failed to reach the North Pole but his methods of travel and survival were deeply influential. Other sledges from the Nimrod expedition survived — one is part of the permanent Ernest Shackleton exhibition at the Athy Heritage CentreMuseum — but the one sold at Bonhams was catalogued as “the only example we have traced with provenance to one of the four Southern Party explorers”.
Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the time typically carried sledge flags, to be flown on special occasions and for photographs. Eric Marshall’s sledge flag, also dating from the Nimrod expedition (est. £30,000 to £50,000; €33,000 to €55,000) sold for £75,000 (€85,513) in the same sale. The silk flag, which shows a red unicorn head and a gold anchor, features in many of the expedition photographs. On January 6, the day before they turned for home, Marshall wrote in his diary: “make one last dash without the sledge. Sledge flag tied in back to help keep warm tonight.”
Few objects were carried on Antarctic expeditions and even fewer returned. Anything that did will command a high price at auction, but other polar memorabilia has value too. The Arctic Medal (renamed the Polar Medal in 1904) was awarded by the British Sovereign for “extreme human endeavour against the appalling weather and conditions that exist in the Arctic and Antarctic”. One of these was awarded to Timothy McCarthy (1885-1917) from Kinsale, Co Cork. McCarthy was serving as an able seaman in the Royal Naval Reserve when he applied to join Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914. He was one of 26 men chosen to crew the Endurance for the expedition and, crucially, he was one of the five who accompanied Shackleton on the epic open-boat voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia. His Polar Medal (est. £15,000 to £20,000) sold at Dix Noonan Webb in London for £65,000 in July 2016.
On a slightly less epic level, the signatures of any of the expedition leaders will do well at auction. Whyte’s forthcoming Eclectic Collector auction in early April includes two examples of Shackleton’s autograph. One, a simple signature (est. €500 to €700) is pasted on to a leaf from an autograph book is dated “Jan 7th / 14.” The other (also est. €500 to €700) is inscribed “Waifs and Strays Meeting — March 1912.”
The auction also includes a replica of the whiskey carried on the Nimrod (est. €100 to €150) and a silver spoon commemorating Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole in 1911 (est. €500 to €800). A first edition in two volumes of A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, during the years 1839-43 by Sir James Clark Ross (1847) (est. €700 to €1,000) describes his pioneering expedition to Antarctica.
In January 2017, a postcard sent by Captain Robert Falcon Scott in 1904 fetched €440. The postcard was posted in Christchurch, New Zealand, on the 1901-04 British Antarctic Expedition’s return journey and is addressed Scott’s hand to a Mrs Wrench in Ballybrack, Co Dublin. Mrs Wrench may have been a relation of the publisher of the card. Wrench’s issued four postcards to be posted at different stages of the expedition to subscribers who helped finance the venture. But Wrench can’t have done his research on Antarctic wildlife as the postcard, hilariously, showed a picture of a polar bear.